Heywood Pension Tech
From 2023, pension schemes and providers with over 1,000 members must integrate with the Pensions Dashboards and provide this information by law. In this blog, Harriet Hirst covers the key tasks for funds to focus on and how we can support you.
I suspect by now we’ve all heard about the Pensions Dashboards Programme (if you haven’t, there’s a great blog post about it here) and how over the next two years, the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) will develop, test and launch the Dashboards to the general public. The aim of the programme is to increase members’ awareness and ownership of their pension and reconnect individuals to lost pension pots.
From 2023, anyone will be able to connect to the Pensions Dashboards and view details about the various different pension pots they have. From 2023, pension schemes and providers with over 1,000 members must integrate with the Dashboards and provide this information by law.
If your scheme is not Dashboard ready, you could be fined up to £50,000
As a pension scheme, what do you need to do to get ready for the big day? Here is your checklist:
Ensure that members' details are up to date
Poor quality data could result in a member being unable to find their pension pot, inaccurate details being displayed or worse, a mismatch resulting in pension details being displayed to the wrong member, resulting in a data breach.
Ensure that members' details are accurate
The Pensions Dashboards will need to display an Estimated Retirement Income for the pension, which must be calculated accurately and returned to the Dashboards. Inaccurate data will cause member dissatisfaction and ultimately increase administration effort as the member will need to contact you directly for the information they require.
Don't forget about your paper records
Any data that is held off-system that is relevant to the Pensions Dashboards needs to be digitised so that it can be accessed by the Dashboards ecosystem.
Determine how you will match on members
Schemes will need to determine which fields they will use for member matching when they receive a “Find” request, in order to generate the most accurate matches between the Dashboard and their Pensions Administration System.
Connect to the Pensions Dashboards
Schemes will need to integrate their Pensions Administration System (PAS) with the Pensions Dashboard ecosystem, in compliance with the Dashboard APIs.
Maintain the integrity of your own systems
Any “Find” requests will be sent out to all data providers for any user that logs in to the Pensions Dashboards – meaning you’ll get Find requests from all users, not just those who are members of your scheme. These requests need to be handled and responded to, without impacting on the integrity and performance of your own systems.
Plan beyond 2023...
Being 'Dashboard ready' goes past 2023. As well as cleaning up your data ahead of the 2023 go-live deadline, you will need to put an ongoing audit and validation plan in place to ensure that good quality data is always being passed to members through the Dashboard.
That's quite a big list and requires quite a lot of work. Before you push this down your to-do list for 2022 or even 2023, please note that if your scheme is not Dashboard ready, you could be fined up to £50,000.
With this in mind, how can Heywood Pension Technologies help you to prepare for the changes ahead and alleviate the pressure on already strained resources?
As an alpha partner, we are working closely with the PDP and our customers to build a range of solutions to provide schemes with a 'one-stop-shop' to prepare you.
Our Dashboard-ready solutions
Our Data Readiness service will offer an end-to-end provision to ensure that your data is prepared. Our service will provide an in-depth analysis of your data, identifying areas where corrections are needed, or data is missing. To ensure Data Accuracy, we validate your data against third-party services such as address checking, to determine an optimal method of matching or how best to return Estimated Retirement income.
Once the Pensions Dashboard is live, our Ongoing Data Health service will support you to work proactively by creating a Data Management Plan in line with PASA Guidance and conduct regular audits of your data, with regular cleansing.
To ensure our customers have a robust, secure and fully-integrated solution for connecting Altair to the Pensions Dashboards ecosystem, we are developing an Integrated Service Provider (ISP) solution. Our ISP will hold encrypted, regularly refreshed data and manage the traffic to and from your Altair services and the Pensions Dashboards. We will also be offering an Integrated Service Provider (ISP) solution for non-Altair customers. This would be for both DB and DC schemes that will provide a simple, cost-effective solution for all schemes to integrate with the Dashboards and comply with the legislation, that is secure and robust.
Being “Dashboard Ready” is a continuous process for you and does not end in 2023, so we understand that you need a service that you can continuously call and rely on. For more details on how our solutions will solve your Pensions Dashboards needs, watch out for our next blog in this series.
Harriet Hirst is a Customer Relationship Manager and part of the team developing PDP-ready solutions.
